Obituary

Ravi Shankar

TRUE, it was his brother Uday who was the star, the one Anna Pavlova had danced with, the one James Joyce said moved “like some divine being”. But critics were quite taken with young Ravi Shankar’s dances too, and he was beginning to enjoy the spotlight as his brother’s troupe toured Europe (to say nothing of the gorgeous brocade costumes for his parts as Snake-Devil or Monkey God). Then there was Paris itself in the 1930s, thrillingly modern, with moving pictures and electric trams and glamorous women in evening gowns. But most exciting of all was to be at the centre of a cosmopolitan, cultured whirl: Andres Segovia dropping in to discuss music, Pablo Casals playing, Chaliapin singing. He could barely contain himself at the excitement of it all.

With time, though, the sheen had begun to dull. It infuriated him, even hurt him, when those distinguished European musicians listened to an Indian virtuoso play a magnificent classical piece on the sitar only to complain that “it did go on and on so”, or that they couldn’t tell “when it started and when it finished”. Frankly, he felt a bit sorry for them. For he found the perfect melodiousness of Baba Allauddin Khan’s sarod-playing or the dazzling sitar fretwork of Ustad Enayat Khan just as thrilling as anything Westerners could do.

Maybe what was needed was someone able not just to perform Indian music, but to explain it to Europeans in words they understood. Someone like him, the son of a Middle Temple barrister, whose French was nearly as fluent as his English, who understood counterpoint and harmony, might be just the number. Except that nobody in India would believe that the spoilt youngest son of the former prime minister of a Rajput principality could take the rigours of a classical sitar player’s training.

Did he believe it himself? There was only one way to find out. He would have to go to Maihar, the tiny, dusty town in central India where Baba lived and taught. And not just go, but go transformed, from dashing dancer in silks to shaven-headed young disciple, wearing coarse cotton, carrying a single tin suitcase and the mattress he would unroll onto a crude string cot. Perhaps this complete shedding of his previous self, or at least all outward show of it, would persuade Baba to take him seriously and to teach him how to play.

At the very least, it would make Ravi focus on music himself. From 1938 to 1944 he survived in that little town where the only night diversion was the howling of jackals and the croaking of frogs. Six years of nothing but scales and finger exercises and being yelled at by his guru, who was turning out to be quite the tyrant. (At least Baba never tied him to a tree, as he had his own son, though a taunt about his weak wrists hurt so much that he nearly left.) But he kept going, braving the jibes, listening, absorbing, until at last his fingers caught up with the music inside his head.

After that, who could stop him? Not those who said Baba’s daughter Annapurna, whom he had married, played better than he did. Nor those who dismissed as un-Indian his insistence on being seated on a proper raised stage. (Had they not read the ancient treatises, with their clear prescriptions for proper staging?) Certainly not the rajahs and their courtiers, who were used to eating and drinking and chit-chat while musicians played. (He had told the crown prince of Jodhpur and the Maharajah of Nathdwara to keep quiet, or he wouldn’t play, and—though deeply shocked—they had obeyed him.)

He learned not to mind Western audiences, still ignorant decades later despite his continual rounds of touring, clapping before he had even begun at the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971. (“If you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more”, he had joked.) And he ignored all those sniffy purists in India who carped that he had sold out, simplifying and shortening Indian music for Western ears. (Nonsense, he said; you could play a raga, or melodic setting for improvisation, for three minutes or three hours.)

To tell the truth, though, he was still a bit sensitive about what the real connoisseurs thought. That was why he kept going back to India and playing the same raga for five hours at a stretch at music festivals in Bombay and Poona and Calcutta. That was why he was stung enough by critics in Delhi, who said Vilayat Khan’s lightning-fast fretwork was better than his, to challenge his rival to a “rematch” (the offer was declined.) That was why he, teacher of George Harrison and associated forever with the 1960s and flower power, objected so strenuously to all the talk of him “jamming” with the Beatles. Yes, yes, he composed music for Western musicians, but it was Indian music, composed using Indian scales and rhythms. For while he loved all music, he loved most of all the soothing, almost sombre strains of the shehnai that he had first heard wafting from the grand houses by the Ganga in Benares. That calm, that feeling of transcendence, was what he sought, which was why he spent so much time on his improvisatory sequences in the lowest, gravest octave.

He was always mindful, too, that his audience had to feel elevated, not just by the music but by the magic of it all. And so he smeared his palms with alta, the red dye Indian dancers used on the soles of their feet, all the better to allow them to shine in the light as his fingers flew over the frets.

Yehudi Menuhin , the great American Violinist (1916- 1999) who helped introduce Ravi Shanker, Ali Akbar Khan and Chatur Lal to the West, said of a “chamber music” recital he attended played by Shanker (whose instrument was the sitar ) and Khan (whose instrument was the older, perhaps less brilliant in tone vina ): “To be present, as I have been, listening to each musician goading the other to new heights of invention, is an experience more magical than almost any in the world. One is in the presence of creation.” Menuhin explained (to the Western audience) the improvisation in Indian music this way: “Given his form and meter before he starts, like a poet commissioned to write a sonnet or a ballad, the Indian musician resembles more a medieval troubadour than a composer sitting before blank paper at his desk. He does not interpret; he is . An oral tradition is a wonderful thing, keeping meaning and purpose alive and accessible. As soon as an idea is confined to the printed page, an interpreter is required to unlock it. The Indian musician requires no intermediary; he creates in public and does not keep a record.” I suppose within this meaning of music, the beauty in this art form knows no beginning and no end. It simply is.

I was not so fortunate to have ever heard Ravi Shankar live. One thing or another, I managed to miss his concerts both times he came to my city. As commenter before me so very beautifully articulated,"...the shock vanished immediately but the beauty never ended" Indeed, thank you Mr. Shankar.